The Piplets

Spurred on by exciting possibilties - none of which have sprouted as of yet - I have started off my next project. The Piplets. The piplets were four pips out of a clementine orange I was eating at work yesterday. I've not tried oranges of any description before so I thought hey, why not.

Thankfully there is no recommendation to suspend them above water to get them to root - no idea how I would have done that considering how tiny they are. So I've gone for the more traditional method of a little pot of compost with a plastic bag over the top. For now I'm keeping them on top of the radiator to keep them warm, but when (I'm being positive, when, not if) they germinate, I'll move them to a windowsill so they get more light.

For some reason this website insists on uploading this photo on its side and I can't figure out how to rotate it.

Anyway, interesting fact about pips extra from Keith Mossman. When growing plants from pips of things you have eaten, you are often not going to get a plant of the same species as the fruit you ate. This has a lot to do with the cultivation of fruit trees. I know a little as I do have some wee apple trees in the back garden - they're all grown on one type of root stock, but then the apple varieties are grafted on to the trunk. Also, a lot of the pips turn out to be duds in the sense that they will never become fruiting plants themselves. And now a particularly interesting fact about citrus pips... whereas with other pips, it's one seedling per pip, with citrus, you can sometimes get two or three seedlings a pip. One of these may become a great fruiting tree, the other two might be duds. But you'll never know until a few years in, so you've got to try and grown on them all to edge your bets. In the case of the clementines, there are only four pips in there. So it will be interesting to see what I get.